India: Patent Office to be affirmed as a Depositing Office

Source: www.ipindia.nic.in

Recently, the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks (hereinafter referred to as the ‘CGPDTM’) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (hereinafter referred to as the ‘WIPO’), entered into a cooperative agreement at Geneva, Switzerland (headquarters of WIPO).

The Agreement was signed to facilitate the regular exchange of data between these offices including Indian Patent documents, search and examination reports through WIPO CASE (Centralized Access to Search and Examination) and WIPO Digital Access Services (DAS), thereby enabling the priority documents to be made available electronically.

The WIPO CASE system allows patent offices to securely share, search and examine results related to patent applications in order to facilitate work sharing programs.

DAS authorizes applicants to request the first office (known as the Depositing Office or Office of First Filing) to make priority documents available to the system and then to request other offices (known as the Accessing Offices or Offices of Second Filing) to retrieve those documents via the service.

The Agreement also envisages the following activities;

·    improvement of IP business services that includes projects for digitalization, data capture and data quality improvement,

·         data exchange for the dissemination of IP information,

·         provision of business systems by WIPO for digitization,

·         document management, and

·         creation of national and/or regional IP databases.

The implementation of the aforesaid agreement will promote the CGPDTM as a depositing office for WIPO CASE, enabling the office to make available the search and examination reports of Indian Patent applications.